It takes me 19 minutes to get to Dundrum Town Centre. I don't live remotely near Dundrum, and have never wanted to, but, still, a scoot down the M50 and, 19 minutes after putting the key in the ignition, I can pull it out again, under one of the little green lights that tell you where the parking spaces are, writes Anne Enright.
Around me I hear the clunk of other car doors, as other mothers who have just dropped their children at school in - God knows - Navan, maybe, get out to walk the indoor aisles of the shopping centre.
Most of the 9.30am crowd have another child in a buggy. Most of them have blond highlights. They don't wear coats, because the shopping centre is an indoor experience. It is, as I have discovered, a fantastic way to throw away a day's sunshine. Precious stuff, sunshine. I probably need it a lot more than I need two scoop-neck T-shirts from Marks & Spencer, even if they do cost less than a pack of marinated prawns in the food hall downstairs.
The price of clothes has gone down, in Ireland, by 11 per cent. Which makes the experience odder still. How can a dress cost less than a family meal? Who let that happen? The oddest thing about Dundrum Town Centre is that if you go there more than twice in a week you will lose the will to live. But this is well known - the soul- destroying effects of consumerism are well known. It is not the fault of the shopping centre, even if it has appropriated the name of a perfectly good town. Because when people say "Dundrum" these days they mean a four-storey English high street that landed up the road and started wiping out all the other names in a radius, including Ballinteer. I actually quite like the place.
I finished writing a book the other week, after two years at the keyboard. I lifted my head to sniff the air. What should I do now? Maybe, two years later, it was time to clean the house. Certainly. I would certainly clean the house, but first I would take a mere 19 minutes to jump in the car and check out Harvey Nicks.
And what a peculiar experience that was. It was not that I had forgotten how to shop. It was not even that I had forgotten what I look like now (though that, too, can cause problems). It was that I occasionally, for stretches of time, forget how to want things. How do I want a bag, for instance? Everything is covered in buckles. I have no interest in buckles. I have even less interest when I look at the price tags.
I want something beautiful that carries things, but so much of the stuff is ugly, quite simply ugly. And I wonder, briefly, what this ugliness might signify. There is obviously a stylish ugliness around that I don't get, being too old for it now. So what I want, when I want a bag, is to be young, and to understand the way bags go these days. But I am not. And I don't. Is this a success or a failure? I'm not sure.
But I'm not a complete eejit. I can work it out - the sort of stuff I am supposed to wear and might like wearing. I can, actually, shop. After two years at the keyboard I think what I really want is fresh air, but you can't put that in a bag and hide the receipt when you get home. And in among the clothes are other things that I want, such as distraction, mindlessness, company, nobody pulling out of me, a mild amount of adrenalin, and things to look at that will do me no harm. But do I want that dress? Hmm.
The problem is, I know what women want when they buy clothes. They want to be thinner. This is not the same as wanting a green or blue dress. We look at the dress and want to be a different, thinner woman buying this dress. Though we probably prefer the blue. Green can be so draining.
I am a failed consumer. I buy two scoop-necked T-shirts and a prawn salad in M&S. I eat the prawns in the car park. It is time to lose weight. It is time to aspire. I look at everyone's bag as they pass and think: "Okay. Buckles. Buckles. Think about buckles." I lose the will to live.
I go home and get out the vacuum cleaner. Then I leave the vacuum cleaner. I go upstairs and start another book.
• Róisín Ingle is on leave